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Globalization And African Economies On The Verge Of The 21st Century HISTORY MORALITY AND CAPITALISM Private Morality and Capitalism: Learning from the Past By Deepak Lal Christianity In this context, it is worth noting the important difference between the cosmological beliefs of what became the Christian West and the ancient agrarian civilizations of Eurasia. Christianity has a number of distinctive features which it shares with its Semitic cousin Islam, and, in par, with its parent Judaism, but which are not to be found in any of the other great Eurasian religions. First and most important is its universality. Neither the Jews, nor the Hindu or Sinic civilizations had religions claiming to be universal. You could not choose to be a Hindu, Chinese, or Jew; you were born as one. Second, this also meant that, unlike Christianity and Islam, these religions did not proselytize. Third, only the Semitic-based monotheistic religions have been egalitarian. Nearly all the other Eurasian religions believed in some form of hierarchical social order. By contrast, alone among the Eurasian civilizations, the Semitic ones (though least so the Jewish) emphasized the equality of men’s souls. Dumont (1970) has rightly characterized the resulting and profound divide between the societies of Homo Aequalis, which believe all men are born equal (as the Philosophies, and the American Constitution proclaim), and those of Homo Hierarchicus which believe no such thing Thus Christianity, as we shall see, is and remains at the nub of the West’s beliefs, and at the heart of the ‘clash of civilizations’ posited by Samuel Huntington (Huntington 1997). There can be little doubt that neither the Hindu nor the Sinic civilizations have adhered to the Western notions of liberty and equality based on individualism. But, neither did the West, for a long time. For though Christianity came inadvertently to promote the ‘in-worldly’ individualism which is a hallmark of Western civilization, in its basic teachings it did not differ greatly from the communalism found in the other great ethical beliefs system of the Ancient world. Like Stoicism and the Hindu Religion, it provided a place for ‘out-worldly’ individualism. As Dumont notes: ‘there is no doubt about the fundamental conception of man that flowed from the teaching of Christ … man is an individual in-relation-to God … this means that man is in essence an out-worldly individual’ (Dumont 1986:27). The Course of Western Individualism But the course of individualism has not been simple in the West. It would take us too far afield to go into this in detail, but the importance of St Augustine’s City of God must be noted. Throughout the last millennium, the West has been haunted by its cosmology. From the Enlightenment to Marxism, Freudianism, and Eco-fundamentalism, Augustine’s vision of the Heavenly City has maintained a tenacious hold on the Western mind. The same narrative, with a Garden of Eden, a Fall leading to Original Sin and a Day of Judgment, keeps recurring. Thus the eighteen-century photospheres of the Enlightenment, in their refurbishment of Augustine, displaced the Garden of Eden by classical Greece and Rome, and God became an abstract cause—the Divine Watchmaker. The Christian centuries were not taken to be the Fall, with the Christian revelations perceived to be a fraud as the ‘enlightened’ deity expressed his purpose through his laws recorded in the Great Book of Nature. The Enlightened were the elect and the Christian paradise was replaced by Posterity. By this reconfiguration of the Christian narrative, the Enlightenment philosophers though they had been able to salvage a basis for morality and social order in the world of the Divine Watchmaker. The subsequent attempts to found a morality based on reason are open to Frederich Nietzsche’s fatal objection in his aphorism about utilitarianism. He wrote : ‘Moral sensibilities are nowadays at such cross purposes that to one man a morality is proved by its utility, while to another its utility refutes it’ (Nietzsche 1881/1982:220). Nietzsche’s main contribution lies in his clear recognition of the moral abyss that the death of its God had created for the West. Kant’s attempt to ground a rational morality on the principle of university –harking back to the biblical injunction ‘therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do even so to them’—founders on Hegel’s two objections. First it is merely a principle of logical consistency without any specific moral content, and second as a result of this, it is powerless to prevent any immoral conduct that takes our fancy. The subsequent ink split by moral philosophers has merely clothed their particular prejudices in rational form. The perceived death of the Christian God did not, however, and variations on the theme of Augustine’s ‘City’. It was go to through two further mutations in the form of Marxism and Freudianism (Gellner 1993; Webster 1995), and a more recent and bizarre mutation in the form of Ecofundamentalism.4 Marxism, like the Christian faith, looks to the past and the future. There is a counterpart to the Garden of Eden, i.e. the time before ‘property’ relations corrupted ‘natural man.’ The following Fall in best regarded as ‘commodification’, which leads to a class society and a continuing but impersonal conflict of material forces. This, in turn, Marxism perceived would lead to the Day of Judgment with the Revolution and the Millennial Paradise of Communism. Marx also claimed that this movement towards earthly salvation was mediate, not, as the Enlightenment sages had claimed, through enlightenment and the preaching of goodwill, but by the inexorable forces of historical materialism. Another secular ‘City of God’ has been created. Eco-fundamentalism is the latest of these secular mutations of Augustine’s ‘City of God’ (Lal 1995). It carries the Christian notion of contemptus mundi to its logical conclusion. Humankind is evil, it claims, and only by living in harmony with a deified Nature can it be saved. The West’s current cosmological beliefs, inadequately summarized by the word ‘liberty’ are thus, at present, incoherent. As the philosopher Alasdair Macintyre as powerfully argued (Macintrye 1990), the contemporary Western notion of self has three contradictory elements. The first derives from the Enlightenment. It views individuals as being able to stand apart from exogenous social influences and constraints, and allows them to mould themselves in accordance with their own preferences. The second component concerns the evaluation of oneself by others. Here the standards are increasingly those of acquisitive and competitive success, as nurtured (so some would believe) by a bureaucratized and individualistic market economy. The third element derives from its remaining religious and moral norms, and is open to various ‘invocations of values as various as those which inform the public rhetoric of politics on the one hand and the success of Habits of the Heart on the other’ (Macintyre 1990: 492). This aspect of the self harks back to the Christian conception of the soul, and its transcendental salvation. We believe that these three elements comprising the Western conception of self are not only mutually incompatible, they are incommensurable. They also lead to incoherence as there are no shared standards by which the inevitable conflict between them can be resolved. So as Macintyre puts it rights based claims, utility-based claims, contractarian claims, based upon this or that ideal conception of the good will is advanced in different context, with relatively little discomfort at the involved. For unacknowledged incoherence is the hallmark of this contemporary developing American self, a self whose public voice oscillates between phases not merely of toleration, but admiration for ruthlessly self-serving behavior and phases of high moral dudgeon and indignation at exactly the same behavior. (Macintyre 1990:492) Many in the West can be seen as going back to the worship of the multiplicity of ‘gods’ and personal moral codes (particularly in the realm of sexuality) which are reminiscent of the per-Christian Graeco-Roman world. The growing number of non-Christian ‘New Age’ religions, which is occurring at a time the traditional churches continue to lose followers, is a testament to the growing ‘neo-paganism’ in the West. In the ensuring plethora of moral beliefs—particularly in a cross-cultural context—it is a brave soul who would be able to find any basis for a universal ethnic. But if reason or a universally acceptable God cannot provide us with a common basis for morality, and if—as we have seen—morality is need to reduce the ‘policing’ type of transactions costs for economic efficiency, on what basis are we to found this morality? Here it is interesting to re-examine David Hume’s views to two and a half centuries ago. In his Treatise of Human Nature (1740/1985), his beings by recognizing that morality is essential to control man’s self-aggrandizing instincts to garner the gains from co-operation. However, he does not try to ground morality in a belief in God or in reason, but rather in tradition. As he observes: ‘the sense of justice and injustice is not derived from nature, but arises artificially, tho’ necessarily from education and human conventions’. Once they are in place ‘sympathy with public interest is the source of moral approbation, which attends that virtue [justice]’. This leads parents ‘to inculcate in their children from the earliest infancy, the principles of probity, and teach them to regard the observance of those rule by which society is maintained as worthy and honorable, and their violation as base and infamous’. Hume, then, while clearly accepting the role of morality in maintaining the social cement of society, believes that its contents are primarily dependent on a society’s traditions and forms of socialization. Neither God nor reason needs to be evoked to justify these conditioned and necessary habits. This is very much the view of ethics taken by the older Eurasian civilizations with their moral ecology based on shame. Given the multiplicity of ethical traditions, does it matter for our contemporary economy if there is no common agreement about the content of morality, as long as each society has its own morality to constrain immoral behavior? As we have argued elsewhere (Lal 1998b), although in the rise of the West the changed in cosmological and material beliefs were conjoined, this is no longer necessary once the legal and other infrastructure for a market and commercial society (e.g. as created by Gregory VII’s eleventh-century Papal revolution) is in place. Today, the rest of the world has the option—as is dramatically illustrated by the Japanese example—of adopting the West’s material beliefs, which are necessary for prosperity, without adopting the West’s cosmological belief’s and surrendering its own moral ecology. In short, it is possible to modernize without Westernizing. Nor, as Adam Smith demonstrated so effectively in The Wealth of nations (Smith 1886/1991), does a market economy have to depend upon the scare virtues—like benevolence (which for Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments was the highest virtue)—for its efficient functioning. It only requires a vast number of people to deal and live together, even if they have no personal relation-ships, as long as they do not violate the ‘laws of justice’. The resulting commercial society promotes some virtues (what Shirley Letwin (1992) has labeled the ‘vigorous virtues’)—such as hard work, prudence, thrift and self-reliance. IMPLICATION FOR GLOBAL CAPITALISM What implications does all this have for global capitalism? A major implication, as I see, it, is that, in a global context many of the ethical complaints against capitalism are misdirected. In many cases they are atavistic, harking back to the material beliefs of the old agrarian civilizations. In the following section we shall examine this contention from the viewpoint of three of the critical institutions of capitalism, via. markets, the state, and NGOs. Markets Because of space limitations, I shall confine my discussion to some common complaints about the global capital market—but from a historical perspective economic historians consider the creation of the national public debt and the Bank of England in the late seventeenth century, as an essential element in the rise in economic power and social status of the merchant and financier in the subsequent years. This rise, however, posed severe problems for the prevailing Aristotelian ethical beliefs of these societies, which as we have seen questioned the virtue of acquiring wealth by the lending of money. More especially a ban on interest was common to all the ethical systems of the pre-modern world. It was based on Aristotle’s unequivocal statement: Usury is detested above all and for the best of reasons. It makes profit out of money itself, not for money’s natural object . . . Money was intended as a means of exchange, not to increase at interest. (Aristotle n.d.: 20-1) This prohibition on interest was gradually lifted in the West. But, ethical worries about the ‘unreality’ of credit and of the socially unproductive nature of interest resurfaced with a vengeance following the Financial Revolution of 1694-6, which created a vastly expanded credit mechanism, leading to the rise of the rentier. In J.G.A. Pocock’s words: The stocks which were his title to return upon the loans he had made became themselves a commodity, and their value was manipulated by anew class of stockjobbers. (Pocock 1975:72) In the ensuing Augustan debates, this posed a severe problem for the traditional value system shared by both opponents and friends of the new goddess Credit. In this system, the moral foundation for civic virtue and moral personality was taken to be independence and real property. Property in the form of land was the most real asset, and though the wealth of the trader and the merchant was movable, and hence not as reliable in inducing civic virtue as the owned by the landlord, it did at least consist of real things. By contrast, the wealth of the stockholder and the stock jobber, as created by the new system of public credit, was though to be unreal and fantastical: Again as Pocock puts it: When the commodities to be bought and sole were paper tokens of men’s confidence in their rulers and one another, the concept of fantasy could be more property applied, and could bear the meaning not only of illusion and imagination, but of men’s opinions of others’ opinions of them. (Pocock 1995b: 76) GLOBALIZATION GLOBALIZATION AND AFRICAN ECONOMIES ON THE VERGE OF THE 21ST CENTURY
lobalization discourse also tends to be elitist in that it ignores the resistance and oppositional narratives of numerous social groups and movements, such as labor, that have been impacted negatively by globalization. As Glenn Adler (1996:118) puts it, “without taking labor seriously as an actor in the GDL (global division of labor) it is difficult to asses where challenges are likely to emerge, as well as the substance of such challenges and their likelihood of success. However, the profound pessimism described here seems based less on an actual analysis of counter-hegemonic projects than on an unfounded fatalism. “This is to suggest that globalization is not a mechanical and uncontested process of capitalist expansion. It involves and implicates labor and other popular forces and social movements who challenge, mediate, and restructure the processes of globalization at local, national, international levels. It is not a coincidence that in recent years there have been unprecedented struggle against authoritarianism and for democracy, which have been inspired more by the ravages and recessions brought by globalization to large masses of people, than by its benefits and benevolence. Thus as Barry gills (1997:66) notes, “it is by no means certain that politics will follow a pre-written neo-liberal script in the future.” It is also important to note that many of the social movements resisting globalization are themselves increasingly globalized and facilitated by the technologies of globalization. In short, focusing on social movements and their struggles offers possibilities for conceptualizing alternative visions and structures for brining about sustainable development and democratization. The project of change and struggle must involve, claims Stephen gill (1997:250) “‘double democratization’ – of government and political life, at both local and global levels. Efforts need to be intensified to substantially democratize more internationalized forms of state and an embryonic global civil society. In this sense, the neo-liberal globalization tendency will continue to be countervailed politically-it is neither inevitable nor an ‘end of history’, as some of its advocates and apologists seek to claim.” This suggests that globalization is not simply a process, but an ideology based on the assumption that the processes and forces constituting globalization are both inevitable and beneficial. What has been the experience of various world regions with globalization and its inseparable ideological twin liberalization? The record is quite mixed and seriously disputed. The South Center (1996:22) argues unequivocally that for the leading industrial countries which “have been operating under a market supremacist regime of more or less free trade and capital movements for the last ten or fifteen years… so far the liberal economy has failed to deliver in many important respects. “Annual growth rates for OECD countries fell from nearly 5% in the 1960 to 3.2% in the 1990s and to 1.5% between 19991 and 1994; unemployment reached 35 million in 1994 or about 10% of the labor force as compared to an average unemployment rate of about 2% between 1961 and 1970; and growth in real of about 2% between 1961 and 1970; and growth in real per capita output fell by half from nearly 4% per year during the period 1950-1973 to about 2% between 1980 and 1995. Thus the OCED countries have performed much poorer under a more globalized and liberalize regime implemented since the 1980s and 1960s than they did under the “regulated and illiberal” 1950s and 1960s, prior to their deregulation of internal financial, product, and labor markets. The south Center (1996: 28-0) report concludes: “Contrary to the conventional wisdom, economic analysis and the lessons from economic history would suggest that it is not so much that liberalization and globalization lead to faster economic growth, but rather that higher rates of economic growth and employment are necessary for such a regime to be sustained.” In short, while inflation has been characterized by far greater instability in terms of output and employment as well as fluctuations in interest rates, all of which have contributed cumulatively to a sharp rise in the cost of capital, there by leading to steep falls in the rate of investment and a decline in the rate of productivity growth which offset any benefits the technological revolution associated with the rise of new information and communications technology might have had. The experience of Asia, Latin America, and Africa with liberalization and globalization has varied quite considerably. Until recently East Asian economies experienced sustained high rates of growth for three decades, while the record for Africa and Latin America was more mixed; indeed, the 1980s are largely seen as a “lost decade” in both continents. Conventional neoclassical explanations advanced by the international financial institutions, such as the World Bank and IMF, attribute the success of the East Asian economies to their liberalization and globalization. A vigorous debate has raged particularly on the role that the state played in the “economic miracles” of the East Asian tigers. The international financial institutions and their academic allies sought to present the Asian success as a triumph of laissez-faire liberalization and globalization. It is significant to note that it is the more liberalized and globalized tigers, not the more regulated China, that have borne the burnt of the crisis, which has spread to Russia, threatens to engulf Latin America, derail Africa’s fragile economic recovery, and is lapping at the shores of Western Europe and North America. On the one hand, there are those who believe the crisis was triggered by the hyper-mobility of speculative capital, which undermined a series of Asian currencies and caused them to collapse. The rescue pack-ages proposed by the IMF with heir usual conditionalties of imposing high interest rates, cutbacks in government expenditures, and forcing bankruptcies of weak enterprises, turned what was initially a financial crisis into a full-blown economic and political crisis. Others blame the crisis on crony capitalism and corruption. The crisis, according to this view, simply shows that these countries have reached the limits to growth possible under the restrictive policies that enabled them to grow to rapidly before. They are paying the price, not of too much liberalization and globalization, but too little.
oth narratives of the East Asian success and subsequent crisis raise serious questions about the role of states as agencies of, and for, development in the era of globalization, and the latter’s impact on the economic performance and prospects of specific countries and regions, in better or worse, by states, globalization must be judged by its capacity to deliver concrete benefits in specific countries and regions. African Economies Since 1960s
fter independence African countries pursued a wide range of development strategies, from unadulterated free enterprise philosophy of Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, and Morocco, and the mild socialism of Algeria, Tanzania and Zambia to the oscillations of Ghana, Egypt, Guinea and Mali, and the resolute Marxist zeal of post-revolutionary Ethiopia, Mozambique and Angola. These varied ideological permutations sprang from differences in the modalities of accession to independence, colonial legacies, resource endowment, the level of development of the productive forces, the class character of the state, the nature and dynamics of the internal contradictions and struggles, and each country’s patterns of integration into the world capitalist system. Their economic performance, therefore, varied, although the variations showed little correlation with official development ideology. It has become popular to assume that postcolonial Africa has been in a state of economic crisis since independence. This simply does not correspond to the historical record. As has been commented by several observers, the statistics upon which the gloomy assessment of “Africa’s economic performance and decline are based are problematic. Each of the major institutions that cover Africa, such as the World Bank, and the various United Nations agencies, including the United Nation conference on Trade and development (UNCTAD), the United Nations Development Fund (UNDP), and the Economic Commission for Africa (EAC), produces its own statistics, using very divergent methodologies. So there is hardly any unanimity even on the same country. Their definition of what constitutes “Africa” is an abbreviation for sub-Saharan Africa, and until recently excluded South Africa and Namibia, as well as North Africa, which is often appended to low and middle income Europe and the Middle East. UNCTD and the ECA, on the other hand, usually cover the continent as a whole. So generalizations about Africa depend on which “Africa” is being covered. The heuristic value of the statistics lies in the trends they depict. It is quite clear that African economies grew reasonably fast up to 1973, when growth decelerated as a result of the world recession. Growth resumed temporarily between 1976 and 1979, after which it plummeted again, thanks to the 1979-82 world recession, the second in a decade. The 1980s were a ‘lost decade’. As might be expected, economic performance in Africa since the 1960s has been very uneven between and within countries. But before discussing that let us examine aggregate rates of growth for Africa as a whole in comparison to other regions. Except for the period 1973-1985, Africa’s performance did not vary significantly from the rest of the developing countries, and was comparable to or higher than that of the developed market economies for all three periods. World Bank (1992:221) figures show that in the period 1995-1980 the GDP of sub Saharan African economies grew at an annual rate of 4.2%, above the world average of 4.0%, and were higher than South Asia’s 3.6% and the OECD members’ 3.7%. Between 1980 and 1990 sub-Saharan’s growth rate dropped to 2.1%, the same as Europe’s, and higher than the growth rates of both the Middle East and North Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean which were 0.5% and 1.6%, respectively. Similar differentiated patterns of growth within and between countries can also be seen when specific sectors are examined. Available data shows that the sectoral performance for sub-Saharan Africa in agriculture was relatively poor, but in industry and services the performance was generally better than the world average, indeed, in the 1965-80 periods the industrial growth rate for the region was second only to that of East Asia and the Pacific. Needless to say, agricultural performance varied enormously between and within countries and sectors and change over time. Of the 25 countries for which the World Bank had data, in 8 agricultural performances between 1965 and 1980 was higher than the world average of 3.7%. The fastest growth rate of 10.7% was recorded in Libya, followed by Botswana with 9.7% and Tunisia at 5.5% (World Bank, 1992:220-1). The same was true of industry, which performed much better than agriculture. As with agriculture industrial performance varied enormously, in the 1965-1980 period, industrial annual growth rates ranged from 24% for Botswana to 4.3% for Uganda. Of the 24 countries whose data was available, in two the growth rate was over 15%, in three it ranged from 10-14%, in ten 5 to 9.9%, in three 3-4.9% , and in four 1-2.9%, and in two it fell below zero (World Bank, 1992:220-1). During the period 1981-90 manufacturing’s share in GDP increased in 21 countries, it decreased in 13, and remained unchanged in five. By 1993 manufacturing accounted for about 16 per cent of GDP, and the share of manufacturing in the total exports of the sub-Saharan countries’ exports rose from 10% to 15%, although there were wide country variations on both scores (World Bank, 1994:47). There is no question that overall, industry performed much poorer in the 1980s than in the period before. This partly reflected the exhaustion of “easy” import substitution options. Import substation was the industrialization strategy that most African countries adopted immediately after independence. It was envisaged that industrial production would move sequentially from consumer goods to intermediate and capital goods. It was also hoped that import substitution industrializations (ISI) would enhance technological development. Generate large-scale employment, and improve the balance of payments (Frenchman, 1982). Before long, however, it becomes clear that many African countries were stuck at the first stage of consumer goods production, and that technological dependence had not been alleviated. The structurealist or dependency critique attributed the perceived failure of ISI to the inherited distorted productive structure, and fragmented nature of these countries, rkets arising from their dependent status in the world capitalist system (Singh, 1982: Nixon, 1982, 1986)
n the late 1970s, and especially from the 1980s some countries began to shift to export manufacturing, including the establishment of the so-called Export Processing Zones (EPZs) (Frank, 1981: chap 3). Both strategies, ISI and export manufacturing, faced severe problems when the world economic crisis broke out. The fall in primary commodity prices meant that many African countries were unable to import substitution industries. Thus, industrial production began to fall. For the export-dependent industrial production began to fall. For the export-dependent industries there was the added problem of growing protectionism in their main markets, the developed capitalist countries. And with falling domestic wages, the internal market could not absorb the surplus production. The result was declining industrial capacity utilization in many countries.
t is quite evident that the patterns of development were very uneven along national, regional, sectoral and temporal dimensions; to that discussions of the African crisis require careful and differentiated analysis. The impact of the crisis itself on African economies was varied depending on the internal structure of these economies and their insertion into the world economy, as mediated principally by the compositions of their exports. Internal political conditions, often tied to complex regional and international forces, also played a major role. But aggregate national accounts, it cannot be believed, hide a lot of regional, class, and gender differentiations in production, incomes, and living standards.
f the statistics presented above can be believed, then Africa’s general economic performance from the 1960 to 1980 compared favorably either with long-term trends or with other countries. During the same period it registered a real per capita growth rate of about 1.6 per cent “which was the same as for all low-countries for the same period. Never, probably, in the past has such a performance been achieved by Less Developed the past has such a performance been achieved by Less Probably, in the past has such a performance been achieved by Less Developed Countries, “comments Field-house (1988:148-9). He continues:” Hence, the disappointments and complaints concerning black Africa relate either to particular countries or groups of countries; to different periods within the twenty years; or, finally, to Africa’s performance compared with that of more developed countries (Filed-house, 1988: 149). He believes that the poor assessments of Africa’s performance in the 1980s were simply the flip the side of the exaggerated hopes of the early 1960s. But his explanation of the economic slowdown in the 1980s leaves a lot to be desired: he blames it all on the fact “that the tropics are peculiarly difficult terrain for the developer” and “the social structures and attitudes of Hyden’s un captured peasantry” (Field-house, 1988: 154-5). This only begs the question: was Africa less tropical between 1960 and 1980, and were the peasants “captured” then? This is voodoo economic history. Neither the weather, nor culture had much to do with the economic crisis of the 1980s that faced many African countries nor were the alleged “policy mistakes” for, after all, the same policies had “produced” growth up till then.
he point is not to say “internal’ factors which exposed and reinforced the ‘internal’ fragilities of economies that were largely underdeveloped and characterized by a narrow and disarticulated production base, severe sectoral, spatial and social imbalances, fragmented product and factor markets, extreme openness and external dependence with a few commodities accounting for the bulk of total export earnings and government revenue, a situation compounded by an imitativemodernism expresses in a “preference for foreign experts, foreign models, standards and goods” at the expense of “experimentation, innovation and self-reliant development” (ECA, 1989: 6-7), and overlaid by weak institutional capability and political authoritarianism and instability. These “internal” structural bottlenecks and weakness, of course, had not been manufactured overnight, but were historical accretions rooted in the colonial economy. Thus the historical record demonstrates the capacity of the African postcolonial state to be developmental, to promote economic growth. “One interesting feature,” comments Thandika Mkandawire (1998:23), “is that much of this growth was sustained largely by domestic savings which increased from around 15% in 1960 to 25% in 1980. The rates of savings and investments compared well with those of East Asia, although it tended to yield lower rates of growth. . . African bureaucracies,” he reminds us, “were able to extend infrastructure and social services to degrees that were unimaginable under colonial rule. The development tide began to turn for many African countries from the mid-1970s. It was not purely coincidental than this was the time when the world economy went into a state of prolonged crisis, whose causes and development we have analyzed elsewhere (Zeleza, 1997). In short, the temporal and structural connections between the African and world crises clearly demonstrates that external forces played a preponderant role in generating the conditions and conjuncture of crisis in many African countries. They were hit by four kinds of shocks: a demand shock to their exports; a consequent fall in commodity prices and terms of trade shock; an interest rate shock; and a capital supply shock (South center, 1995:42). By Paul Tiymabe Zeleza, Professor of History and African studies, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USATO BE CONTINUED IN THE NEXT ISSUE |
